Liberation from the Self

The following words I shall henceforth strive to remember:

終日吃飯未曾咬著一粒米，終日行未曾踏著一片地。與麼時無人我等相, 終日不離一切事，不被諸境惑，方名自在人。更時時念念不見一切相，莫認前後三際，前際無去，今際無住，後際無來。安然端坐，任運不拘，方名解脫。

Taking one's meal every day, one never chews a grain of rice. Walking every day one never steps upon the ground. Without the discrimination between self and others, one lives in the world, not deluded by anything at all. This is a genuinely free person whose thinking is beyond name and form. Transcending the three periods of thought, he understands that the previous period has not passed, the present period does not stay, and that the future period will not come. Sitting properly and peacefully, not bound by the world, this alone is called liberation! (The Dharma of the Mind Transmission)


Albert Einstein's words as follow seem to reinforce the above:

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self”. (In his writings "The World as I see it")

This theme of liberating the self to glimpse life's true meaning is also echoed by Einstein later on, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."